What Exactly are Digital Skills?

When considering the digital skills gap, this question is not asked often enough.

Cornell University defines digital literacy as ‘the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet’6.

By this definition, digital skills are any skills related to being digitally literate. Anything from the ability to find out your high-score on Minesweeper to coding a website counts as a digital skill.


What Digital Skills do I Need for the Modern Workplace?

Knowing how to answer your emails, to access a company’s files on Google Drive, or to tweak a website’s code are all digital skills that are increasingly sought after in today’s job market.

However, in the modern workplace, it is increasingly impossible to point out which digital skills you may or may not need. There is no hard and fast rule about which jobs you will need to Excel for and which jobs you will not. Digital literacy is a language; the more digital skills you have, the better you can speak it. This metaphor struck a chord with noted digital writer Marc Prensky who coined the terms ‘digital immigrant’ and ‘digital native’.

To the uninitiated, learning digital skills can make a person feel like they are entering a new country full of new customs. Digital skills come with their own set of sub-skills after all.